Is The Collapse Of The Foreclosure Market Obama's Worst Economic Legacy?

Joe Weisenthal

Nov. 1, 2010, 3:13 PM

The Democrats will get crushed tomorrow because voters are furious with Obama and the economy, though to be fair, very little of the economic mess is really his fault.

He didn't blow the housing bubble, for example.

So what about the foreclosure mess?

This chart from Fitch shows the number of foreclosures as a percentage of delinquent loans, and what it shows is that foreclosure activity has been slowing rapidly. They key here is that the collapse started a long time ago, and really accelerated in the last year, well before the recent foreclosure-gate brouhaha.

A likely contributor to this mess? The disastrous HAMP program which has put hundreds of thousands of families in limbo, with short odds of people actually staying in their homes in the long run.

And HAMP is all Obama.

If there were some evidence that distressed homeowners were ultimately staying in their homes, and working things out, then that would be good, and it wouldn't be so bad that the speed of foreclosures is collapsing.

All that's happened is that things have frozen and ground to a halt with little to show for it.